My mother called me on the second floor hall phone every Saturday morning at 8 AM. I could hear it ringing from my room at the top of the stairs and I knew it was her. I am pretty sure she was checking to see if I was home.

Stood in line one Sunday night each month to make a collect call home from the same phone on Johnson Hall that Pam Peden used on Saturday mornings. My students cannot fathom this no-tech existence.

My sister, Nancy, and I graduated from a small town in the Sandhills and had never been away from home. We registered late at NWU, and there were no rooms left in Johnson Hall. The staff turned the second floor lounge above the front door into a room for us. They hung heavy drapes over the doorway and replaced the couch and overstuffed chairs with single beds, chest of drawers and a dresser. Our room had a small alcove over the entrance. We liked to walk out there and spy on couples who gathered under the overhang to say goodnight. To make it more interesting, we would sprinkle water down on their heads when they were passionately kissing. This was fun for us but probably not so much fun for the ones who were getting wet. They would just move to another place.

As a former resident of Johnson Hall, I really enjoyed reading these stories! Even though my time in Johnson Hall wasn’t very exciting, my mother has some great stories from when she attended NWU from September 1954 to May 1955. My mother and her sister rode the passenger train from Mullen, Nebraska down the Burlington track to attend college at Nebraska Wesleyan. It was a big culture shock for them but that didn’t prevent them from being a little ornery!

Monday through Thursday in the dining room, Johnson Hall girls ate “family style” with a counselor as the table hostess. Our food was prepared in the cafeteria kitchen on the other side of the accordion door. I heard that eating this way was to help the girls “feel like they were at home.” I do not think this was the feeling most had--more like we had to get “cleaned up” and sit still and make polite conversation for longer than we really liked. I began working in the cafeteria soon after I arrived on campus in the fall of 1953. It certainly was a great place to meet the football players who ate there, and also many of them worked shifts that did not interfere with practice.

I was the “new” counselor in the fall of 1954 when Rex and I began dating. The girls at my dining table that spring of 1955 were all aware of this connection. One night the waiters arrived with individual salads and our waiter was Rex. The girls immediately began to smile, snicker, point--all polite behaviors for the dinner table! Rex set down the last salad and one of the girls began to fidget and make sounds as if something was wrong. A small green caterpillar was crawling out of the chopped lettuce! The fingers began to point at me and at Rex--as if we had anything to do with it! The table became a moving, talking, mass of girls who did not want to have anything to do with their salads. Rex was called back to pick up the salads and I tried to restore order to my table.

Johnson Hall girls had to be in their rooms by 9 pm. Lights were turned out at 10 pm. We thought this rule was pretty stupid, so one evening my sister and two friends hid in the bushes until the doors were locked. As planned, a friend and I were in a first floor room ready to open the window and help them come in. No one caught us that night, but several days later one of our friends started bragging about what we had done. We all got grounded for the rest of the school year.

I had a girlfriend in Pioneer Hall (now my wife, Carol Bachkora Harris ’84) and friends in Johnson Hall. The power to both dorms was controlled by a master switch in an unlocked room on the lower level of Johnson. I cannot remember how or why I made that discovery, but it was more enticing than free beer. What young man with an ounce of mischievousness would have ignored the opportunity? On a Halloween night, I crept into that room and threw the switch. I then walked out onto the lawn to enjoy the cacophony of screams and laughter from both buildings. It was so much fun that I repeated the mischief on the next year’s Halloween. I suspect that the room was finally locked the year after my graduation.

I remember practicing for a speech class presentation on the therapeutic effects of screaming. To minimize the noise, I rehearsed in my Johnson Hall closet. Intrigued, my roommate, Debbie Fettig, promptly joined me. We practiced screaming (and laughing) in the dark. After we finished, I tried to open the closet door only to find the knob turning loosely in my hand. We were stuck—with our room door locked, no less! We screamed for real and pounded on the wall for help. A dashing male student suddenly opened the closet door and rescued us. Before we could learn who he was, he moved to the window and wrapped a curtain around himself. Thus cloaked, he said in effect, “I shall leave as I appeared.” He jumped out our first-floor window, and I still don’t know who he was.

In June 1951 I met Joyce Westerhoff (’55) in front of Johnson Hall while she was playing softball. The ballplayers and I then went to dinner in Johnson Hall. At dinner Joyce asked if anyone with a couple rackets would show her how to play tennis. I volunteered and we hit balls for a few minutes. Joyce then went in while I started across the road to my residence when along came Joe Dappen (’52). He had just picked up a date to go to a movie and said, “Go get a date and go with us.” I went back to Johnson Hall and asked for Joyce. As they say, the rest is history. I married Joyce, and Joe later met and married Joyce’s sister, Betty Westerhoff Dappen (’56). As a result of this event, Nebraska Wesleyan now has Heim Hall.

I lived on the fourth floor my freshman year. One of the first things we did was to remove the window screen so we could sit out on the ledge and enjoy the weather. One spring day, it hailed. After the storm passed, the gutters were full of hailstones. My roommate and I lightly tossed those hailstones toward students who had waited out the storm and were returning to the dorm. They were quite surprised!

I lived on the ground floor my sophomore and junior years, which had its perks. The windows provided direct access for sneaking in and out without the guard noticing. The guard made rounds between Johnson, Pioneer and Centennial’s locked doors after midnight. I can’t take full credit for this idea. I learned it from my best friend who had a similar strategy at the College of St. Mary in Omaha.

I met my husband, Ron Herzinger (’77), at a sock hop that the upperclassmen of Johnson and Burt Halls hosted in the basement of Pioneer Hall on February 22, 1974. A month later we were a couple, and were married 30 years before he passed away in 2006.

As a member of the kitchen crew, I worked in Johnson Hall as it first opened. The building was occupied before construction was fully complete. One afternoon, rather than doing my usual duties preparing the evening meal, I was assigned to dust mop the hallways. As I began each floor, it was loudly announced, “A man is on the floor!” And because some women’s rooms had not yet had doors installed, I kept my eyes trained on the floor in front of me.

The all-male waiters learned the protocol for serving the women in Johnson Hall, and soon our tasks became routine. For example, we were not to talk to any of the diners, except the one designated as “hostess,” who was responsible for communicating any food requests, including the beverage preference of each diner. We waiters then served the food and drinks. Once, whether motivated by mischievousness or by the desire to impress a certain diner, I formally served her an empty glass-empty, except for a small note lying in the bottom requesting a date.

My story involves a scent more than a memory. In 1962, I was a 24-year-old displaced homemaker starting over in Johnson Hall. My time was divided roughly into thirds: eight hours of classes; eight hours of studying and typing up notes or papers; and, with luck, eight hours of sleep. While much is a blur, one thing remains vivid. My room was on the west side of the first floor, and with the windows open nearly constantly, the smell of newly mown grass wafted through the room, urging me to keep plugging away at my dream. Few things in life since that summer have ever held the promise and hope of the earthy, clean smell of that newly-mown lawn. Now, even at 74, when I get a whiff of freshly mown fescue, I am carried back to Johnson Hall and all the promise that the future held for me. Nebraska Wesleyan, for me, will always be a place of miracles.

I worked in the cafeteria in the basement of Johnson Hall. June Menefee (director of food services) wanted students to have only one glass of milk and one dessert. I had real problems with the guys trying to distract me so someone else could swipe an extra dessert or glass of milk from under my nose.

Miss Eberhart was our dorm mother. During the week, we were to be in at 9 p.m. first semester and 9:30 p.m. second semester. That is when the door would lock. I was lucky because if I would stand right by the door telling my boyfriend good night, Miss Eberhart would tug on my skirt so I knew it was time to come in. Therefore I did not get any demerits. If we were late we had to go before Dean Johnson.

Our dorm mother in Johnson Hall was Miss Eberhart. At the time we thought she was a big, mean lady. One night a friend of mine and I got home past our 9 p.m. curfew and couldn’t get in. We threw pebbles at the window of a friend who opened the back door for us. Heads down, we snuck up the back steps. When we got to the top of first floor, we saw some big shoes. There, looking down at us, was Miss Eberhart. We were terrified. We thought we’d surely get kicked out of school. Instead, we were “grounded” for two weeks. Miss Eberhart was just doing her job, but I can relive that 42-year-old story as if it happened yesterday!

We used to put on skits for dorm parties. I lived in the basement for three and a half years. Our male visitors were primarily comprised of various repairmen and night watchmen. One year, our skit was about the men in our lives, and we portrayed those repairmen and guards to the best of our ability. I think we wrote it in poetic form. Those were four great years.